It looks like better support for Windows programs running under Wine interacting directly with USB devices could finally be on the horizon.

Merged today were the initial pieces of Wineusb as a USB driver for Wine akin to Microsoft's WinUSB. In the past were also patches for a program called wineusb separate from this WineUSB driver implementation.

The stub driver was added followed by slowly filling in the pieces to make this driver function. When this feature is enabled, WineUSB depends upon libusb for doing the heavy lifting.

This initial WineUSB implementation was written by longtime Wine developer Zebediah Figura.

At the moment in Wine Git this USB driver code is still in its very early form but hopefully by the release of Wine 6.0 next year will be good USB support in order.